I'm going to be honest, I think my first impression of Demon Slayer when it came out in shounen Jump back in 2016 was sort of high. Then again, I jump on a lot of series without giving the benefit of the doubt. And I was on the hype train for a bit without realizing it. But its funny how anime adaptions can help high-light some of the problems a series can be seen having.
And that was the case with the Demon Slayer anime, although not right away at first. After some reflection I came to the honest conclusion that Demon Slayer is overhyped, and here are some of the reasons why.
Story- The story begins when Tanjirou's family is killed by a demon, all except Nezuko. So now one of the story goals is for Tanjirou to become a Demon Slayer and to cure his sister of being a demon. The training arc happens super quick though. Sure, training arcs tend to be not that interesting, but not only they can be made interesting, they are also important to help establishing the power system of battle shounen, which Demon Slayer fails at completely.
Some sacrifices had to be made to make the speedrun possible and explanation of the powers was one of them. The last thing that makes any sense is the Total Concentration Breathing technique. Master the way you breath and do it consciously all the time to achieve a handy power-up for your stats. A bit of JoJo rip-off but sure, I’ll take it, with some suspension of disbelief it makes sense. How do we get from there to swords summoning fire, pillars of water, mist or a goddamn snakes?
Tanjiro’s dad did ceremonial sword dancing, which made him a fire swordsman. Others just ripped of the fire technique to make their own breaths. How does remaking a fire technique help you summon butterflies with a sword slash? No idea. “It just works”, as they say.
All of the story arcs that happened within Demon Slayer have little impact on what happens outside of them. It sort of feels more like a collection of connected stories, as opposed to one complete story. This is a problem that I think a number of shounen authors end up having, but feels more exaggerated in the case of Demon Slayer.
Art- The art-style does enough to give the series its identity, so that's one good thing about it. It’s certainly distinguishable and original. At least one part of this manga that attracts the readers’ attention, at least one part of this whole thing that is somehow interesting. Characters- At some point though you have to give your characters, especially your morality-driven protagonist, a real question to struggle with. Tanjirou never really questions his actions or his motives. It's all for revenge against Muzan. I find Tanjirou to be very uninteresting to the point where he's actually boring. If I'm being honest, I think Giyu should have been the protagonist instead of Tanjiou. The final story arc is like trying to be long but also tries to be a speed-run like its previous arcs. Even the character deaths begin to feel cheap the more I saw them being used in the final arc. And despite all of the death, the author is now suddenly too much of a coward to let some of the characters die. If you're going to go in, you might as well go all the way. And so now the readers are left with this lukewarm, entirely uninteresting, and artificial-feeling ending. I don't mind happy endings, but they have to be built up to in a way that makes sense. So yeah, I'm very glad that I'm done with the series. And no, I do not recommend this series to anyone. There are much better series out there that has a protagonist fighting demons and this isn't one of them.
Recommendations:
Berserk, Claymore, Devilman, Dororo 2019
On another note:
I'm glad that Koyoharu Gotouge-sensei's series was financially successful. She did rush the last arc in order to help her family during 2020, so the best of luck to the author.
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